Category: Publication Roundup

The September roundup is one of the biggest yet for Women Who Submit members. Congratulations to all!

From Lisa Cheby‘s “War Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Spoilage” at the Rising Phoenix Review:

He didn’t mean to suggest
the harvest would be easy.

We have to get all the skeletons out
of the graves.

From Soleil David‘s “Book of Transnational Feminist Prayer: On Barbara Jane Reyes’ Invocation to Daughter” at Post No Ills:

Barbara Jane Reyes’ fifth poetry collection Invocation to Daughters (City Lights, 2017) is a missal for Filipino women, one that uses Western poetic forms to utter an unapologetically transnational feminist poetics. In this collection, Reyes pushes against Spanish and American influences, the two patriarchs that have kept the Philippines abject for much of its history. The poems subvert Western tradition through the use of those same Western traditions, all while bringing in multiple languages, as well as ruminations on Filipino and Filipino-American culture.

From Arlene Schindler‘s “I Chose a Career Over Babies” at Living the Second Act:

I don’t have regrets about not bearing children. It was a conscious decision. Some parents may see my life as empty, unfruitful, or even immature.

From Désirée Zamorano‘s “Adelanto” at Cultural Weekly:

It starts with pain and outrage.

You’re out of the country when you hear about a Supreme Court Justice stepping down, and the caged children. You want to keen and wail, but you don’t. You want to never return to your country of origin, but you do. You return to daily life at home. Continue reading “A WWS Publication Roundup for September”

As the summer wraps up, we are pleased to share good news from Women Who Submit members who had work published in August.

From Mia Nakaji Monnier‘s “Keiko Agena On Life After ‘Gilmore Girls,’ Her New Book, and How She Copes with Anxiety” at The Lily:

For anxious artists held back by perfectionism, “No Mistakes” provides 150 pages’ worth of interactive pep talks inspired by Agena’s experience doing improv, where there’s no such thing as a mistake, only creative choices for team members to build on collaboratively.

From Jay O’Shea‘s “Beyond Protection: Perceived Threat, Criminalization, and Self-Defense” at IMPACT Chicago:

As I approached the cash machine, another person walked up from the opposite side, a few paces before us. A slim, white woman whose expensive casual wear and designer sunglasses marked her as one of our Westside neighborhood’s more affluent residents, she turned and looked at me instead of giving her attention to the ATM. I offered a smile, acknowledging that she had reached the cash machine first and had dibs on it. When she returned my smile with a scowl, I expected the snappish disdain that well-off women in West LA so commonly project toward other women, but not the question she asked.

“Can you come back?” she said.

From Ava Homa‘s “Graduation” at apt:

I am counting the cracks on the ceiling. My lawyer is presenting some documents to the judge. It is hard to breathe here. This room stinks as if the walls were made of corpses. The judge leaves his seat and is walking to the door that convicts cannot use. It is only for him. The attached light-brown desks divide His Honor’s space from that of the non-honored ones.

Congratulations to Ava who also had her piece, “Nameless Stones,” published in Room!

From Melissa Chadburn‘s “This Wanting Business: On the Cost and Labor of Writing” at LitHub:

I often say that whenever I feel the urge to complain about the work of writing, I think about a woman who has to take five buses to work. The truth is I’m likely thinking of my younger self. She’s always at my heels. In college, I sold Herbalife, called people to refinance the mortgage on their homes, worked as a data entry clerk on campus, and telemarketed selling timeshares. Struggling to get by at school, I eventually dropped out, moved back to Los Angeles, and worked the switchboard at a large law firm in Century City.

From Tanya Ko Hong‘s “Mother Tongue” at First Literary Review-East:

Sophistication isn’t damn good to drink
So why don’t you untie my tongue
like you undress me in the dark, don’t
let my ego ruin our night, don’t scan betrayal
in your mind—life’s not so bad if you don’t pay attention.

Congratulations to Tanya who was the first winner of Run Doon-ju Korean American Literature Award and was interviewed in The Korea Daily!

From Marnie Goodfriend‘s “Finding My Unsolvable Mother in Her Left-Behind Crossword Puzzles” at Ravishly:

As a child, I remember Mom’s stack of crossword books with Velveeta-orange Bic pens holding her place on the current one she was trying to solve. A flimsy card table stood awkwardly in the middle of our living room where she sat in a folding chair carefully separating the edges from the middles of a “Mastermind Impossible to Solve” 1,000 piece puzzle. We often visited a stationery store on Main Street where I ran up and down the sticker aisle inhaling pizza and popcorn scratch and sniffs while she fingered large boxes with display photos of crayons, confetti, stars, and circles. Even at my age, I knew that she didn’t choose a puzzle for its pretty or interesting design but by which sequence of objects was more difficult to finish.

From Li Yun Alvarado‘s “Literatura, Música, y (Huracán) María: Reflections from the Diaspora” at VIDA:

My parents separated when I was twelve years old, and divorced when I was in college.

By some telenovela magic they reconciled two decades later, the summer before Hurricane María roared through their hometown, Salinas, Puerto Rico.

My one comfort during that week of silence was that they were together: through worrying about reaching my brother in New York and me in California; through negotiating with siblings and caring for their elderly parents with whom they each lived; through negotiating this post-Hurricane María world.

Li Yun also saw her poems “Momentos de Maria“and “Zika” published in Hinchas de Poesia and Acentos Review, respectively, and an essay, “Retro Row Helps New Yorker Adapt to Long Beach” published in L.A. Parent!

Congratulations to all!

As the summer winds down, we are happy to share the great news from Women Who Submit members who were published in July.

From Melissa Chadburn‘s “Who Is Anna March?” at the Los Angeles Times:

…Anna March first appeared around 2011, when she started publishing online. Before that, she was known by different names in different cities. In researching this story, The Times found four: Anna March, Delaney Anderson, Nancy Kruse and Nancy Lott.

In three places — Los Angeles, San Diego and Rehoboth Beach, Del. — March became a part of the literary community. She won over new friends, even accomplished authors but especially writers trying to find a way into that world, with her generosity, her enthusiasm and apparent literary success — only to leave town abruptly.

From Désirée Zamorano‘s “The Upholsterer” at the Kenyon Review:

Enrique looked at his cousin and at the sofa that had just landed in his workshop.

The couch was a sodden mess covered in food stuffs, and Enrique really didn’t want to know about it, nor did he have any expectations of what he would find underneath the fabric. Probably a factory-assembled piece of cheap teakwood with low-grade stuffing and springs.

Also from Désirée , “Therapy Saved Me as a Writer,” at Read Her Like an Open Book:

I think therapists hold a particularly profound attraction for writers. So much content, from petty to profound: the stories of grief, menace, abuse and mourning. So many ways to lie, to yourself, to your therapist. So much fun with being an unreliable narrator, as we recreate our biography for an audience of one. So much rapt attention and focus, on our words.

From “Hechizo Para Congelar” by Li Yun Alvarado at UnMargin:

Ingredients:
1. Names
2. Pencil
3. Paper Bag
4. Freezer

Spell:
Pencil names onto
pieces of brown
paper bag.

Let’s say:

donald john trump

From Noriko Nakada‘s “Late Night Phone Calls” at SFWP:

When the phone rang, I knew it was either Laura (Yukiko), or my boyfriend (soon to be the ex-boyfriend) and his calls usually resulted in him coming over to spend the night and me not minding, because I was alone and lonely in this new city.

But when it was Yukiko (Kiko), those conversations jolted me wide awake, There was a frantic, frenetic, frequency in my sisters’ phone calls.

Also from Noriko, “Marbles” at The Rising Phoenix Review:

My father turns eleven just before
he’s told “take only what you can carry.”
He chooses marbles, polished glass spheres, smooth
and cold in his jacket pocket. Six in
all: a shooter, a cats eye, two aggies,
two comets, in swirls of yellow and blue.

Also from Noriko, “Gaps,” at The Rising Phoenix Review:

Your baby teeth
and the baby teeth of all ten
of your siblings were not
included in what
you could carry

when stripped down
to two bags each.

From Natalie Warther‘s “Vinegar” at Drunk Monkeys:

The child had a birthday. People came. They ate the cake. People went home. And once again Dolly was alone, staring at a single slice of cake. Of course, the child was there, precious, soft, aloof, which is company, but it’s different. The windows needed washing.

From Arlene Schindler‘s “The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of” at Purple Clover:

Shortly after I got married in 1982, I learned that my husband had lied about everything. He disappeared for hours on end after making large cash withdrawals from our joint account and deceived me about many other things, including how many times he’d been married. I grew to hate him and myself.

Congratulations to Flint who read her poem “I Call Queer” at ACE/121’s art show, “QUEER!”

A little publishing sunshine in the midst of June Gloom. Congratulations to all the Women Who Submit who had work published this month!

From Noriko Nakada‘s  “Swing” at Thread:

The violence contained within the motion of that bat would have made more sense if he took to our world with his bat, shattering the silence and destroying the façade of sanity. In that chaos, I might have understood the kind of crazy that came home with my brother from the hospital. Instead, there was the whirl of metal cutting through thin mountain air and the rhythmic rush of his breath.

From “Passenger” by Lituo Huang at JMWW:

It was the third day. Things had begun to unravel. We’d slept poorly, and both of us had missed our breakfasts and bowel movements. I watched Ripley feel his stubble as he drove, his unwashed hand brushing over the bristles that peppered the broken vessels on his round cheeks. At eleven a.m., the shimmer already rose two feet off the road. The car’s A/C was dying, blinking its green and orange lights and spewing air the temperature of a fever.

From Arlene Schindler‘s “From Russia with Love” at purple clover.:

In a world where smart women make foolish choices, I said yes when my friend Heather told me she had a guy for me.

At dinner in a Japanese restaurant, Jim, a Sam Waterston lookalike, only had eyes for me. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly taken with him. He had a bushy, unkempt beard and pink sweater that looked like a hand-me-down. But his deep, seductive newscaster’s voice slowly began to draw me in.

Continue reading “A WWS Publication Roundup for June”

May brought lots of amazing work from Women Who Submit. Congratulations to all!

From Tammy Delatorre‘s “Ticking of the Clock” at The Nervous Breakdown:

My aunt died in a car accident when I was six. We buried her, a fetus in her belly. She was only 26.

I try not to hear my own biological clock ticking.

From “Famous Negro Rapper #15″ by Ashunda Norris at Drunk in a Midnight Choir:

Kanye dyed his eyes blue & now i am uncertain
as to whether he hates him or if he is screaming

From Anna Graham Hunter‘s “How #MeToo Accusers Cope After Going Public: ‘My Hatred Has Deepened’” at The Hollywood Reporter:

Life has become more complicated since I came forward, and dating is the least of it. Six months later, I’ve been feeling kind of shitty about the whole thing — in some ways I feel worse now than I did before I went public — and it’s been hard to figure out why. Why have I been so angry? Why do I suddenly burst into tears for no obvious reason? Shouldn’t I be feeling better now that my story is out there? I wondered if I was the only one who felt this way, or if other women who accused powerful men have had similar experiences. I decided to find out by talking to as many of them as I could. Continue reading “A WWS Publication Roundup for May”

Spring has sprung and with it comes a new batch of publications from the writers at Women Who Submit. Congratulations to all!

From “What Is the Value of Chloe Kim’s Gold Medal” by Julayne Lee at Cultural Weekly:

2018 marks the 30th anniversary of the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics at which time South Korea’s baby export business was exposed to the world. After the 1988 Olympics, Korea greatly reduced the number of children being sent abroad. How far has Korea advanced since 1988, in particular from a social welfare perspective? Isn’t this what the Olympics are all about? “Putting human beings first. To build a better world through sport.” While the number of children being sent abroad is now less than 5% what it was during the Seoul Summer Olympics, it seems in contradiction with the Olympic charter and spirit to allow a country that exports and sells its people to host the Olympics.

Congratulations to Julayne whose book, Not My White Savior, was published in April!

From Sara Finnerty‘s “The Consuming Power of Hunger and Desire” at Catapult:

As a young woman, I was rarely in control of my body or my mind. I had hungers like snakes wildly contorting from my head. I hunger for food, for sex, first for my stomach to be full of a baby, then for my baby to be merged back into my body; I hunger for alcohol and pot, for obliteration; I hunger for my family: I want to hold them close and breathe them in but they are like holding a grenade. I hunger to change my story…

Also from Sara, “Dear Baby Witch,” at r.k.v.r.y:

We, the women in our family, have a problem with love, little girl. Love inside of us is a hard black hole, baseless, bottomless, always threatening to suck the rest of our bodies through its borders and to consume us until we no longer exist. Love is something too heavy to hold. Love isn’t something we think we deserve. We have been taught love means to clutch, to drag down into the dirt. Love is something to bear. But that is not what love is.

From “Rose McGowan Is You, Too” by Marnie Goodfriend at LA Weekly:

Brave. Unapologetic. Determined. Artist and actor Rose McGowan is a force in the fight against the pervasive sexism, harassment and assaults against women in Hollywood. She is angry, and rightly so.

Also from Marnie, “The First Girl: On the Loss of Friendship” at ravishly:

The first girl I fell in love with had broken toenails and hazel eyes the size of silver dollars. Ivy was a ballerina who grew up on a street named after a flower. We met as freshmen in college; our firefly bellies lit up with freedom and a sense of belonging to the world and each other. I’d wait for her outside of Bobst library where she had a work study binding the spines of ancient books too fragile to sit on a shelf without restitching their covers back together, even on the rainy days when wind swept my umbrella into a black crown above my head.

Congratulations to Marnie who won a scholarship for a retreat at the Vermont College of Fine Arts!

From Tina Rubin‘s “How a Woman Who Lived in a Windmill Taught Me that I Mattered” at The Coachella Review:

“Come,” she said, extending an arm, and walked me briskly around her “yard,” a grassy spit of land next to the canal. “Holland is below sea level,” she said in lilting English, “so we have the windmills! They pump water from the canals. Without them, the North Sea”—she pointed northwest—“would submerge us.” I looked in the direction of her finger, but all I could see were repeating rows of canals and windmills stretching across the landscape like an infinity mirror.

From Rachael Rifkin‘s “Here’s What Works Better than Forcing Your Kid to Say Sorry” at Today’s Parent:

“Say you’re sorry,” we say to our kids when they grab someone’s toy, hit their sibling, or do the many other undesirable things they do as they’re learning to respect other people’s possessions and bodies.

And that’s often where the conversation ends, with little if any discussion of what happened, why it was hurtful to the person they’re apologizing to, how they can address the hurt they caused, and what they can do to change their behaviour.

Check out Rachael‘s piece, “Forgotten Letters” featured on the podcast, Reservation Row.

From Noriko Nakada‘s “Education in Resistance” at Entropy:

I sat, my ass baking on the hot asphalt, staring up at the skyscraper that housed the bureaucracy I protested. Shadows of faces pressed up against the glass, faces attached to bodies who claimed to work for students, but went weeks, months, before seeing students or setting foot on a school site. I wondered what they did in that building all day.

From Arielle Silver‘s “5 Reasons Why a Writer Should Move to Tampa” at LitHub:

We writers need long moments when we can look away from the black and white of our stories and let our minds wander. Florida’s wild and strange beauty feels like another world, and Tampa’s unique flora and fauna can reunite a heady mind of words with sensual experiences.

From “Reverberations” by Désirée Zamorano at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

A tony high school for teenaged girls is the setting for a predator in inspirational English teacher clothing. Victoria Namkung’s These Violent Delights mines a subject that is tragically, outrageously, maddeningly evergreen.

From Romaine Washington‘s “at the end of the devil’s breath” at voicemail poems:

…july.
wilted cereal in a bowl / we
drown in brown boiling milk.
the haze of sparklers and fire-
works add to the deafening heat
that drips into

august.

Congratulations to Eileen Cronin who was a quarterfinalist for the ScreenCraft Screenwriting Fellowship for her script Autobiography of a Secret.

Congratulations to Tanya Ko Hong whose poems “Look Back,” “Mother Tongue,” and “The War Still Inside” were published in Dryland.